[Restoration] Ability analysis

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To support my intuition I made a quick analysis of the Restoration Druid's healing abilities in Warlords of Draenor as it is now. Thought I would share it with you. To back up my claims: I have completed several Challenge Modes already and I had a good amount of top 10 healing ranks back in Siege of Ogrimmar.

The following estimations are based on a 640 item level in a situation with 0% overhealing.

Passive effects like Living Seed, Omen of Clarity and Enhanced Lifebloom are all taken into consideration in the calculations.

Glyph of Healing Touch, Glyph of Rejuvenation and the fact that Lifebloom is extended by casting Regrowth or Healing Touch on the target is NOT taken into consideration.

Germination and Incarnation: Tree of Life are picked as talents. The Wrath healing is with Dream of Cenarius selected, otherwise it doesn't heal.

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Paloro has a good point, in that we can't tell how much more efficient Healing Touch is than Swiftmend, or how much better Swiftmend's throughput is, etc. There's no frame of reference. Putting normalized numbers on the chart would make it easier for us to draw conclusions. When it comes to efficiency and throughput charts like this, you want to be able to explain how the data should be interpreted and applied, and you can't do that without some kind of numerical data.

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The size of the bars is proportional to the efficiency or output for both charts. I can give you the numbers with decimals from which I made the charts, but I believe a visual representation provides a far better overview.

As for your example:

The bar of Healing Touch is roughly 20% larger than of Swiftmend, therefore using Healing Touch gives you roughly 20% more healing for your mana. The accurate values are 0.95 for Healing Touch (no Lifebloom) and 0.73 for Swiftmend.

The bar of Swiftmend is roughly 33% larger than of Healing Touch in terms of output, and therefore using Swiftmend gives you roughly 33% more healing if you were to spam both abilities in a hypothetical scenario and then compare the output.

I left the charts to be interpretated by whoever reads them. But if you want, I can give you a few examples of conclusions you can make from the chart.

For absolute efficiency, you would need to maintain 100% uptime on Lifebloom as well as 100% uptime on Mushroom in any scenario where it would always heal 2 or more players at all time or 3 players most of the time. Healing Touch is slightly better than Rejuvenation for healing the target with Lifebloom efficient and slightly worse when healing someone without Lifebloom. From this you can conclude that Healing Touch should be used on the tank or the target with Lifebloom while raidmembers or partymembers suffering damage should have rejuvenation applied. Another conclusion is that it is more efficient to cover the raid in Rejuvenation than to use Wild Growth. This also applies with Tree of Life activated. Swiftmend actually isn't very mana efficient and should be used for: healing on the move, emergency healing, making sure to maintain 100% uptime on the buff provided by our mastery, if you're spamming Rejuvenations and not doing much direct healing. A last conclusion to draw: using mushroom on just 1 target is actually efficient if it doesn't overheal at all. Given the buffer it provides with a 30sec duration I would always have it up as long as it always heal one target without overhealing.

However, we all know we can't be healing from a perspective of maximizing efficiency. Damage will come in spikes and the encounters are designed so that you should be near 0% mana when an encounter ends. Therefore you sometimes have to use inefficient abilities in order to save party or raidmembers. Using both charts you can conclude:

- If the party is taking sustained damage, having 100% uptime on Mushroom is highest priority.

- If covering the raid in Rejuvenations isn't enough, Wild Growth should be used on cooldown whenever it doesn't overheal.

- In a 5 man party, Tranquility has a very low output considering the cooldown of the ability. Don't use this ability if Wild Growth isn't on cooldown or will come off cooldown mid cast. If Tranquility doesn't overheal any target, it will outperform Wild Growth with 9+ raid members affected or with 12+ raid members affected if Tree of Life is activated (which it shouldn't if you plan to use Tranquility)

- Considering Swiftmend and Regrowth are nearly equal in terms of efficiency, Regrowth should be used to emergency healing due to it's higher output. Swiftmend should only be used if: Remaining time of mastery buff is less than 1 second; the target would die before you can cast Regrowth; or you need to move.

- Tranquility has a very low output on a single target. If you're solohealing (as in a party), don't use Tranquility if one of the party members won't outlive the duration of the channeling, usually being the tank. To avoid this, make sure to have multiple HoTs up on the tank before using this ability, as he usually takes more damage than it can actually heal.

- Mushroom has a very high output even when just healing one target. For single target tankhealing, it is actually more efficient keeping Mushroom up and then spamming Regrowth than just spamming Regrowth.

These are just some quick conclusions, I hope you see where I'm going. This wasn't mean to be a guide. I just wanted to share the calculations I made as I already spent a few hours on that. I made the chart entirely to help myself getting a visual representation for easier understanding the different abilities. I just re-rolled from Resto Shaman in MoP so I needed a bit math to support my intuition.

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Pretty helpful information. Could you do one comparing maximum single-target and max-target HPS, i.e., what to use during periods of heavy damage. I'm especially curious about the synergy between Soul of the Forest and Rampant Growth, since I'm experimenting with that right now. It's probably not ideal since I need a lot of spirit to avoid going oom, but I like the flexibility of having large bursts on demand, instead of tied to a 3 minute cooldown. Kind of curious what Force of Nature does too, since it costs zero mana.

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Pretty helpful information. Could you do one comparing maximum single-target and max-target HPS, i.e., what to use during periods of heavy damage. I'm especially curious about the synergy between Soul of the Forest and Rampant Growth, since I'm experimenting with that right now. It's probably not ideal since I need a lot of spirit to avoid going oom, but I like the flexibility of having large bursts on demand, instead of tied to a 3 minute cooldown. Kind of curious what Force of Nature does too, since it costs zero mana.

Haven't tried that combo, seems like a big manawaster indead. Might be awesome group healing though during some fights...

I actually use Force of Nature at the moment. This is since I rarely need the Swiftmend+Regrowth healing at the same time and Force of Nature gives me some free throughput increase during the encounter...

I would say for the best emergency group healing it's getting your wild mushroom in the right place, keeping WIld Growth up and spamming Regrowths...

Edited November 25, 2014 by Impurex

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Pretty helpful information. Could you do one comparing maximum single-target and max-target HPS, i.e., what to use during periods of heavy damage. I'm especially curious about the synergy between Soul of the Forest and Rampant Growth, since I'm experimenting with that right now. It's probably not ideal since I need a lot of spirit to avoid going oom, but I like the flexibility of having large bursts on demand, instead of tied to a 3 minute cooldown. Kind of curious what Force of Nature does too, since it costs zero mana.

For 20man raiding, the priority for max raid wide output is:

Tranquility

Keeping Mushroom up (assuming it heals 3 targets)

Using Wild Growth on cooldown

Keeping Lifebloom up

Spamming Regrowth

If you have Incarnation: Tree of Life active, Rejuvenation gets really close to Regrowth in terms of output and should be used instead due to mana efficiency.

If you have Soul of the Forest chosen as talent, this priority essentially doesn't change, except having to use Swiftmend before every other Wild Growth. Using this empowered Wild Growth immediately is more important than refreshing Mushroom, if it were to expire at the same time.

Regarding the tier 100 talents:

For maximum output, I believe Rampant Growth is slightly better, if you're also smart about consuming the Rejuvenations or Regrowths at the right time and you have the Soul of the Forest talent chosen as well. However this is not mana efficient at all. This could be a viable way to play in encounters where heavy damage spikes come in intervals of 30-45 seconds, but only if you wouldn't be able to survive it with just rotating a few raid cooldowns (or if your raid cooldowns should be saved for a later point).If possible, I'd go with Dream of Cenarius to heal 100% mana efficient in between the damage spikes.

For maximum mana efficiency, Moment of Clarity is potent. This could be viable for long encounters with low but sustained damage, where people wouldn't drop dead just because it doesn't proc for half a minute. I genuinely don't think this talent will be useful for many encounters.

The default go-to talent should be Germination though. It increases your overall output and mana efficiency by up to 16% (in theory 20% but you have to keep up Lifebloom, Mushroom and Mastery buff as well) and gives you a lot of flexibility. First of all it makes Rejuvenation more viable than Healing Touch (when comparing output versus mana efficiency), which enables you to heal more raid members at once due to shorter casting time. Also the likelihood that Rejuvenation will overheal is less than that of Healing Touch (assume that both your Healing Touch and Rejuvenation heals for 40k: a full health raid member takes 20k damage. Both abilities would give you a 20k overheal, but chances are that the raid member will take damage again soon, which would cause Rejuvenation to do no overhealing). Germination also gives you more control of your healing. While Wild Growth does indeed heal more than Rejuvenation, 4 out of 5 of the targets are randomly selected. Using Germination could therefore be more potent when you know beforehand which targets will be taking damage over the next ~15 seconds (eg. a damage over time effect, or an aoe effect hitting specific groups like a stacking ranged group or all melee raid members). The chance of overhealing is in this case reduced again. A last reason why Germination pulls ahead - in my opinion - is the simplicity of the talent. Rampant Growth (when paired with Soul of the Forest) requires a bit of planning ahead (having a Regrowth or Rejuvenation with little duration ready to consume when you need the Soul of the Forest buff), while Moment of Clarity requires you to track the buff and react immediately when it procs as well as standing still for the entire duration, severely limiting your mobility. Germination on the other hand gives you maximum mobility and much less to worry about, meaning you can have more focus on other things like watching your own feet. It also makes it much more smooth refreshing Rejuvenation on targets with just one of the buffs applied, because it doesn't overwrite the buff, meaning you don't have to pay attention to when the duration of the Rejuvenation drops below 30% (which means you don't overwrite and waste any healing).

At least those are my thoughts on the talents. We will have to wait for the raids to be released before we can determine which talents will be most useful. It is hard to say how much mana we will have available and how big the damage spikes will be.

Edited November 27, 2014 by Shedim

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For maximum output, I believe Rampant Growth is slightly better, if you're also smart about consuming the Rejuvenations or Regrowths at the right time and you have the Soul of the Forest talent chosen as well. However this is not mana efficient at all. This could be a viable way to play in encounters where heavy damage spikes come in intervals of 30-45 seconds, but only if you wouldn't be able to survive it with just rotating a few raid cooldowns (or if your raid cooldowns should be saved for a later point).If possible, I'd go with Dream of Cenarius to heal 100% mana efficient in between the damage spikes.

Pretty much exactly what I've been trying to do so far, in PUG heroic 5-mans where no one knows how to not stand in stuff. There's just too many kinds of fire that can kill the squishier classes in the time it takes to get a Regrowth off.

During low damage phases, mushroom + Lifebloom on the tank + Dream of Cenarius is usually enough to keep everyone topped up. But then during the high damage fights, using Swiftmend almost every other cast (and popping tranquility at just the right time) tends to be the only thing keeping everyone alive. If everyone is pulling around 10k DPS (because PUGs), I usually end up hitting 0% mana at the same time the boss hits 0% health.

If raids continue to be as spiky as dungeons currently are, I might just end up keeping this build. Hard to say for sure though.